


a story about war

by Adversarial



Category: Eddsworld - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Dissociation, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Experimental Style, Gen, Inspired by Richard Siken, M/M, Mental Instability, Minor Canonical Character(s), Norway (Country), Seasonal, War, Weirdness, Winter, all ships are incidental., but if "character study" and "DID" and "inspired by Siken" are tags that you find compelling, trying to tag this is an absolute nightmare, you'll probably be into this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:01:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26980306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adversarial/pseuds/Adversarial
Summary: If you leave a boy alone in a war for long enough, the war will tear through him like a hurricane. The wreckage it leaves behind is a trace; this is a negative copy of the destruction, a mirror image of the force that ripped him in two. This is how the war repeats. It carves itself a home inside of the boy, and the boy carves the war out of himself with trembling fingers.There are always consequences to amputation.---A character study and a homage to Richard Siken'sWar of the Foxes.
Relationships: Tom/Tord (Eddsworld), Tord/Tord (Eddsworld)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 40





	a story about war

**Author's Note:**

> [Recommended listening.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrji1mpbMpc)

Inside of the boy, there is a small wooden house asleep in the shadows of the mountains. Inside of the house, there is a boy asleep on the couch, covered in a crochet blanket and shivering. Outside the window, the fjords are clear and bright as mirrors.

The house is old-- it has existed inside of the boy for almost twenty years now. Everyone in the house knows that it is a copy; outside of the body, there is a real house, in the real mountains, and sometimes it is no longer summer and the sun sets in earnest. The house outside has grown decrepit in its age, its windows stained with dust and wood soot from the fires. The house inside has not changed since the day the boy had tucked it away inside himself and tucked himself away inside of it, holding the sunlight close to his heart. The house belonged to his grandfather, a man that no one who lives in it now remembers.

Outside of the boy, there is a bedroom full of his belongings. There are clothes and guns and delicate screwdrivers and a hidden room behind the north wall that will cause him heartache later. He does not know this yet, but his body does-- every time he looks at the false wall, his stomach drops and his chest goes tight. It's a feeling he knows well. There is comfort, there. In the familiarity of it.

Inside of the boy, the sun reaches down to kiss the water goodnight. Doesn't quite touch.

\---

When the alarm goes off in the morning, there is a stirring in the den of the house.

 _Tord_ , a voice says. It's gentle, and it is tired. _Tord, you need to wake up_.

The boy on the couch curls up tighter, pulls the blanket over his face. It isn't real, but the scratch of wool fibers against his cheek is close enough to count. _Ngh_.

 _You can't keep doing this_ , the tired voice says. Tord feels Summer settle himself on the arm of the sofa. He means well, because Summer always means well. Whether Tord deserves this patience is up for interpretation. _Did Red..._

Summer realizes his error the moment he says Red's name. Tord lets out a harsh breath, and around them the house shudders. _He didn't_ , Tord says, and neither of them believe it. _I'll be fine. Just. Not this morning_. _Please_.

 _I'll do it, then_ , Summer concedes, and Tord relaxes. Upstairs, someone is stomping around. This will be a problem soon, but not yet. Summer closes his eyes, blocks out the sound. Focuses.

Outside of the house, the body wakes up.

\---

Here is what there is to know about Summer.

A very long time ago, an old man took his grandson out on a fishing boat into a fjord as blue as the sky. The boat was small and smelled of the sea and fish guts, gasoline and damp wood. Above them, the sky stretched boundless and cloudless all the way to Heaven.

The old man, with a voice rough like the mountains, told his grandson many things. He spoke of the frost giants deep in the woods, and the color of his daughter's eyes, and the way that sun never set in the summertime. The grandson, wrapped in thick knit scarves he would one day grow into, rocked back and forth with the waves and listened with wide eyes. That night, he stared out the window to see the truth for himself. Lo and behold, his grandfather had spoke the truth: he stayed up all night, and the sun never set.

When the morning came, the grandson was exhausted, and his grandfather laughed a laugh like glaciers thawing when he learned why. Carried his grandson to the couch and let him spend the day half-asleep while quiet voices drifted by around him.

Things were simpler, then, in the times before the war. It is a shame that they are not remembered.

\---

Summer takes stock of the body with a practiced ease: it's been sleeping too long, nauseous and dizzy with hunger. Its throat is dry, its head aches. When he touches his chin, he feels four, maybe five days of stubble. His fingers shake. He sighs, and the body sighs with him.

He rises out of bed, makes his way out into the hall to the bathroom. He trails his hand along the walls, just in case the body's legs give out on him. They've been doing that more and more, lately.

He waits outside the bathroom, where Matt's muffled singing is just audible over the sound of the shower. Downstairs, in this house outside of his body, he can hear Edd cursing at the stove.

 _Where's Tom?_ a voice from inside calls. Ram's awake. _Fucker owes me money._

Summer shrugs the body's shoulders imperceptibly, and Ram snorts. _Shit, dude. Why are you out here?_

 _Tord's sleeping in,_ Summer says, and Ram makes an aggravated sound that echoes on the edge of Summer's hearing.

 _Red was up late_ , Ram grumbles, and that was all Summer needed to know. _Didn't sleep on the couch or anything, thank God. He came back upstairs._

Summer's vision swims for a second, and the body's hold on the wall goes tense. _Has Tord been eating?_ he asks, when it passes.

 _I said that Red was up late_ , Ram repeats, derisive, like it should answer the question. It does.

\---

This place is good for all of them, Summer thinks, when he leaves the bathroom and sees Tom and lets Ram push his way outside. They're bickering in seconds, Ram grinning with fresh-brushed teeth and Tom narrowing the voids of his eyes as he rubs his own unshaven chin. Ram makes a joke that has Tom laughing despite himself, and a weight that both of them were carrying lifts.

"Missed you, jackass," Tom says, giving Ram a shove as he takes his turn in the bathroom, and it gives Ram and Summer both pause. "It's weird when you lock yourself up for days. Come out more often."

"Gay," Ram shouts, as Tom slams the bathroom door and clicks the lock. _Missed you, too._

Summer takes them down the stairs and into the kitchen, makes himself plain toast and cuts apple slices and drinks lukewarm water-- anything that will go down easily-- and Edd beams at him.

"Tord! You're alive!" he says, and Summer gives him a bashful smile. Edd has always liked Summer best, whether he knows it or not. Summer suspects that, on some level, he does. "Would you like bacon?"

"God, yes," Ram cuts in, before Summer can say _Please_ , and Edd rambles cheerily about nothing in particular as the frying pan sizzles. Matt stumbles in later, half-asleep and cradling his tea, followed by a freshly-showered Tom, and this is what Summer has always wanted. His body protests the whole time he eats, but that's alright-- there is sunlight streaming in through the windows, and Ram is kicking Tom under the table, and inside the house Tord is fast asleep, listening to the voices filter through his twin homes.

There is a storm brewing, Summer knows. He is a fisherman at his core; he tracks the clouds on the horizon with a certain trepidation. There is no avoiding the nature of these things.

For today, though, there is conversation and there is calm. This is all Summer can ever ask for.

\---

Here is what there is to know about Ram.

A long time ago, there was a boy, and there was a long, brutal summer, and there was a war. There is always a war, the boy learned quickly, and the only way to survive a war is to become a soldier.

The dorms he lived in were raucous, made loud by other boys and steel bed frames that creaked when sat on. There were many things that the war taught the boy, with its heat and sweat and flies and mud-streaked boots. How to strip a land mine, how to drive a car, how to take a gun cold in your hands and aim steady and shoot. How to not go tumbling down with the kickback.

The summer was brutal, but it was not all war. When he fell ill and shaking with fever, there were others there, bringing him water and rice and cool palms pressed against his forehead as he choked on his delirium. There were beers, too, smuggled and blood-warm, and stories told around trashcan fires in voices that were cracking for the first time.

Any smell can become home if you fall asleep to it long enough, and the boy made a home of gunpowder and silt and iron.

Tucked away in his chest, right next to his heart, the boy had already hidden another one.

\---

If anyone was going to be the one that figured them out, it would be Tom.

It was Ram's fault, really. He was built social, had a brutal sense of humor that bounced well off of his roommate's. The two of them didn't clash like Tord and Tom did. Ram was an easy man to please: he wanted beer, he wanted to shoot cans in the backyard, he wanted to talk shit and could take shit in turn. When Tord woke up next to Tom for the first time, with two hickies on his neck and a sinking dread in his stomach, he wasn't surprised. This was it, after all. A home, a few friends, enough to chaos to keep him from getting too bored, someone to keep him warm at night. This life was everything Ram had ever wanted.

So began the tension.

Tord couldn't understand why Tom kept throwing an arm around his shoulders. He pulled away when Tom would go in for a kiss. Tom got confused, then pissed. Tord withdrew further into his room, then into himself, until he got so miserable that it would call Ram forward and the cycle could start fresh. Locked in the quiet of the house in the mountains, Ram would watch Tord screw up everything he had built for himself on the outside with gritted teeth. Sigh. Build it from the ground up, again and again.

It was a fucking miracle, Ram thought. That Tom hadn't noticed yet. That he kept letting Ram back in. That love, or whatever this was, kept Tom seeing only what he wanted to see.

There is always a war. Ram knows that better than most. But in the meantime, in the limbo between gunshots, he can have this.

\---

There are rules.

Summer had set them, when he emerged dripping from the fjord to set the house in order. They are simple, on the whole: do not let anyone outside the house know about the house. Do no unnecessary harm. Do not lie to the other members of the house. Do not hurt Tord or the nameless child who hides under the stairs. Do not go into the room behind the false wall. As long as Summer's rules are obeyed, the house is calm and the sun outside stays placid in the sky.

Ram remembers the days before Summer arrived. They were short, cold. Sometimes, the snowdrifts would get so tall that they'd reach the second-story windows, and the den would grow muggy with trapped heat from the fireplace. There was a lot of fighting in those days. A lot of fighting. Ram's not proud of who he was in the claustrophobia of wintertime.

Those were the days when Red would wrap himself around Tord like a shawl, or smoke. Always with his hands on Tord's shoulders. Always with a whisper in Tord's ear. They were inseparable, back then.

There is always a war.

\---

Here is what there is to know about the child.

There has always been a child, just as there has always been a war. There is always a place under the stairs where the forgotten things hide, wrapped in more bandages than skin and with scar tissue where one eye should be. In the old days, when it was just Tord and Red in the house, the child would sometimes find its way outside, into a body and a life that it could not recognize. It does not leave the house like that anymore.

There are things that the child knows that nobody else knows, not even Tord. The child knows the name on Tord's old birth certificate, the number that will make the phone in his great aunt's apartment ring. Under the stairs, the child sings nonsense songs in a language that sounds like glaciers thawing; it makes Tord go the kind of still that everyone worries will mean tears. Red has made the child suffer for this. There is always a war.

Still, the child sings. Still, the child waits under the stairs for the times when the house sleeps, when it can tiptoe its way into the kitchen to drink from the tap until its throat is soothed. It is so very hungry. Sometimes, it goes almost a week without eating.

There is always a war. The child knows this. It is good at going hungry.

It waits patiently for the carnage to pass, locked deep in its bunker deep inside of the boy.

\---

By the time Tord wakes up, it's already nearing evening.

Outside of the house, he watches Ram and Summer do a better job of being Tord than Tord ever could. Summer smiles, and Matt lights up. Ram laughs, and Tom laughs with him. In the spaces between words, Edd looks relieved-- relieved that someone left Tord's room, relieved that the balance of his house has been restored for the moment. When it is Tord alone in his body, Edd rarely smiles like that. This has been true for many years now. This is not a truth that Tord can change.

Tord thinks about the room beyond the false wall. Remembers the sedition Red murmured to him, in the soft dusk of the night before. Makes a decision.

\---

Here is what there is to know about Tord.

He has reddish-brown hair. He is just under six feet tall in his stocking feet. His eyes are grey, his skin is light, he freckles in the summertime. He has a degree in mechanical engineering and his favorite drink is Akevitt and one time he got too fucked up at a frat party and drove his roommate's car into the lake and his roommate has never forgiven him for it. He doesn't know how to drive. He doesn't know how to do a lot of things that everyone assumes that he can, and he will never admit this, and he spends a lot of time hiding in the bathroom on his phone looking up how to clean a fish or fold a fitted sheet or tell if your documents are falsified. His documents are falsified, and he does not know why.

There are many things he does know, though. Some of those things are machines. Put a soldering iron in his hands and he is a god. The metal sings for him, takes shape and form according to his whims. The only time the war in his mind is quiet is when he is building.

He knows that, if he lets the war get too loud, there are consequences. He knows that, when Red is set free, people are hurt. He knows that Red hates him, more than Red has ever hated anything, and he knows the measure of exactly how long and how far Red can hate. He knows that, when he cries, Red will come find him on the couch inside his mind and slot his body against Tord's back, two spoons shut tight in the kitchen drawer of a house that doesn't exist. He knows that he will sleep deeply and well those nights, and that he will wake up feeling sick with Red's closeness. He knows that Red loves him.

He knows that there is always, always a war.

\---

The door to Red's room is closed, but not locked. Outside of the house, Tord hears Tom breathe something into Ram's ear, feels it in his fingers and face when Ram catches Tom by the wrist and smirks. The nausea is back. He knocks on the door without thinking.

 _I have conditions_ , Tord says, when the face of his persecution stares back into him. It is a mirror of his own: pale eyes, fair skin, the same scattering of freckles. They are twins. They are many things to one another.

Red breaks the symmetry when he smiles. The sun dips low in the sky.

 _I knew you'd come around_ , he hums. There is always a war. Red steps back from the doorway, welcomes Tord inside.

Now, as he always has, Tord follows him.

\---

Once Ram falls asleep, Tord slips back into his body and steadfastly ignores the aches of it. Sneaks his way out of Tom's room, eases open the door to his own. Looks long and hard at the north wall.

 _It will be simple_ , Red says.  
_It will do no harm_ , Red says.  
_Your conditions will be obeyed, I promise. They'll be far out of the line of fire. You'll be far out of their way._  
_You'll be safe. No one will ever hurt you again. I'll make sure they can't hurt you again._  
_Isn't this what you've always wanted?_  
_A way to make a world where you won't hurt?_

\---

Here is what there is to know about Red.

If you leave a boy alone in a war for long enough, the war will tear through him like a hurricane. The wreckage it leaves behind is a trace; this is a negative copy of the destruction, a mirror image of the force that ripped him in two. This is how the war repeats. It carves itself a home inside of the boy, and the boy carves the war out of himself with trembling fingers. There are always consequences to amputation.

Red is the trace. Red is the wreckage. Red is the pieces of the boy that were lost in the fire. Red is the blood on the boy's hands that never washes off. Red is the boy's manic urge to take his gun and lay down blanket fire until the world is too dead to harm him further. Red is warpath charisma. Red is singing while Rome burns. Red is the weeping of the angelic choir. Red is Moloch. Red will never be calm. Red will never die. Red will make sure that the world will never, ever dare hurt him again. Red will inflict himself onto the world until it loves him. Red will inflict himself on Tord until Tord loves him, because Tord is Red's frail, beating heart given form outside of his body. Red knows that, until the day when the two of them negotiate some sort of armistice, neither of them will ever know peace.

There is always a war. Red knows better than anyone not to hope for the things he cannot have.

And so he destroys.

\---

The couch is abandoned the next morning, the quilt neatly folded. Outside the house, the body sleeps with its cheek pressed to a workbench, screwdriver in hand.

\---

It has been three days since the body has eaten. Summer has already given up knocking on Red's door. Ram has not.

 _You're fucking this up for all of us_ , he shouts. He is still pounding on the door. It's been close to an hour. _Why do you always do this, huh? Why do you always._ Thud. _Fucking_. Thud. _Do this_. He's thinking about Tom, of course, but he is thinking about other things, too-- dead dogs and screaming matches with distant relatives and a long, long past of bridges left burning.

Tord lies in Red's bed, eyes unfocused, his head cradled in Red's lap. His hands are twitching. With a soldering iron in his hand, he is a god.

There is always a war. The deadbolt on Red's door holds steady.

Eventually, Ram gives up too.

\---

Under the stairs, there is a stirring. A child emerges from its hiding place, raids the fridge. On the couch, unmoving, lies Summer.

The child takes as much food as it can hold in its small, splinted fingers.

It is going to be a long winter.

\---

Here is what only Red knows.

Inside of the boy is a heart, and beside the boy's heart is a house, and inside of the house is Red, and inside of Red there is a small locked box next to where his heart should go. Inside of the box is a great and screaming terror, deep enough to drown a full-grown man. The box belongs to Tord. Red stole it from him many years ago, when they were still young and clinging to each other through the long, dark nights, counting down the seconds until the sunrise.

He stole it. He hid it deep within himself. He will murder everyone on God's green earth if that is what it takes to ensure that Tord never touches it again.

\---

The sun reaches down to kiss the water goodnight. They slam together in a single act of desperation, leaving both parties mangled in its aftermath. All wars are the same war.

The sun surrenders.

\----

Once the light fades, Red finally emerges from his room. Outside of the house is a car, full of Tord's belongings, and more than one life in shambles, and a series of inevitabilities that are about to be engineered into a new world order. Outside of the house, it is beginning to snow.

Inside of the house, Ram's glare could kill a man and Summer is comatose. Red carries Tord down the stairs, bridal-style, and his brother is light in his arms.

 _Are you fuckers happy now_ , Ram spits. Tord is too weak to move. Red laughs without humor, his heart half-dead and starving in his hands. There is always a war. Red knows this better than anyone.

And yet. And yet.

 _Of course_ , he says.

\---

The winter is long.

As it always goes with these things, no one is satisfied.

**Author's Note:**

> Decided to do something a little different to give myself a break from work on TTB! I had an early draft of this in my notes back in 2018 but lost it when my laptop died-- I'm just happy to finally have it written, even if it's kinda short. I think it needed the extra few years to really solidify. I have DID in real-person life and haven't really been able to write it in a way that I've found meaningful until now, so... Yeah. Thank y'all for reading and expect some more in this vein from me in the future. 
> 
> Thanks and gratitude as always go to the brilliant @jinxedlucky for their endless patience and support, as well as to Kaiya for continuing to read over my fanfic despite having seen a grand total of one episode of Eddsworld!
> 
> See y'all soon!


End file.
